2012/09/23

Back in August 2011, html5j community and Google Japan co-hosted Chrome+HTML5 Conference[ja] at Google Japan office, but despite there were more than 1,000 registrants our office was only able to host 200- we needed to do a lottery and reject 800 registrants from participating...sad. @komasshu (Kensaku Komatsu) - the conference leader this year was very eager to fix that, and this year the conference was hosted by the html5j community, held in Keio University Hiyoshi Campus, with the capacity of 1,000- and decided to do it first-come first server rather than doing a lottery. What happened was that there was over 1,000 registration in less than 30 hours, and we needed to close the registration quickly...

Expectation towards HTML5 technology in Japan is huge, and we were able to learn that directly from those situation as well as from the excited crowd at the conference venue :D

HTML5 developer/designer community "html5j[ja]" is also growing rapidly -Google Groups[ja] surpassed 5,000 members and growing.

Keynote

Keynote by @takoratta (Takuya Oikawa) and @shumpei (Shunpei Shiraishi)- talking about the past, present and future of HTML5. Slides[ja] and video [ja]

Sessions

Time table and all of the session slides and videos can be seen here[ja]- although all of them are in Japanese.

If you are interested in what Japanese developers are interested in now, the top 3 was WebIntents, WebGL/Three.js, and WebRTC.

"WebGL and Three.js" by @yomotsu. Twitter was abuzz (including those who weren't at the venue) with his demo controling MikuMikuDance using Three.js. He introduced many other cool stuff- including JSARToolKit - note that Japanese developers loves AR (augmented reality).

Some of the sessions from developer track includes "The forefront of tough mobile development using HTML5" by @tkihira. Video here- quote "the forefront of mobile HTML5 is how to use Canvas / CSS3 and make the speed faster". Mobile web is super important in Japan, so this session seemed to be very popular. Others included "What's new in Chrome Apps / Extensions?" by @agektmr (slides and video), "Customizing jQuery Mobile" by @yoshikawa_t (slides and video), "HTML5 and IE10 and Windows8" by @ykasugai, "How to make lightweight web applications" by @os0x (slides and video).

[Designer Track]

When you look at the source of various famous websites, you start seeing odd stuff that you as developer would rather learn not to do... @futomi did a session called "Collection of weird HTML5 markups"- video and slides.

Other sessions from designer track included "Sass", "Evolution of CSS and new web tool", "User Interface Design Pattern With CSS3" and "Technical artists in gree that supports the smartphone games geared toward the world".

[Advanced Track]

Apart from the WebIntents, WebGL and Three.js, WebRTC sessions mentioned above, this track included "How to create parallax and responsive website using jQueryMobile" by @shumpei (slides and video), and "HTML Web Platform" session.

Sponsors

Last year's conference was co-hosted by html5j community and Google Japan- this year, in the spirit of the community "Connect, learn, and get excited", the community reached out to a broader web world. Platinum sponsors includes Google Japan, NTT Communications, Microsoft, Adobe, CA Mobile, gree and DeNA, and many more gold/silver/special/media sponsors. Thanks to all the sponsors for making the event happen!

The fun

I don't know why... but the Japanese developers loves to wear costumes ;)

It was great to see the HTML5 community in Japan to expand, and the Conference to be supported by so many developers, companies and participants - the developer ecosystem. Thanks again to all the staffs, volunteers, speakers, sponsors and participants for making such a wonderful and successful conference!!

Appendix:
"html5j" is the community that organized this conference- in addition to that, they have been hosting monthly study groups solely on HTML5 with average 100 participants per session. Every. Single. Month. Amazing.